Beginning this year we've done a gold squish, cutting 50% of all gold across all systems, characters, storage and such. This brought out great results in our analysis and we believe doing it on a yearly basis benefits the economy greatly.

With all of this in mind, we have concluded that all realms will receive a gold squish of 50% on January 4, 2018 giving players, once again, our usual warning and plenty of time to use up their reserves before we commence the adjustment of the economy.

What this means is every piece of gold that exists in circulation, be it in the character's inventory, mailbox, guild bank, website trading system or otherwise, will be simply halved. Exactly as it was done last year too.

As you probably know, our rules prohibit sale of in-game goods via third-party, services. In most cases where players take part in such transactions, they end up losing their accounts, characters or worse, their personal data is obtained and sold to other more menacing third parties. We have done much in the past to combat this, from banning certain VPNs, implementing complex logging systems to procure the gold sources in such transactions and we, of course, have staff monitoring the global channels across our realms and we believe we have succeeded in countering a lot of this over the past few years.

We have also taken a stride in implementing yet another counter-measure, an artificial intelligence driven bot that detects gold seller spam, and dispenses swift punishment whilst also learning over time of the many patterns culprits reside to using.

Meet Jin, an artificial intelligence driven chat bot, which identifies gold spam (no matter how hard it is ciphered with non-latin characters), and learns over time to combat new attempts of gold selling.

The bot has been active for a few months now and it will only get better. With this, including a lot of internal staff effort on our side and many other measures we have, we hope to create an environment where no such game interruptions, as we consider them that way, will exist.

i dont really see the point squishing IC again (last time there was a gold rate change along with it) as the IC economy's basically stable ever since with ***** goldsellers charging more for gold than the same amount would've costed on the official coin trading but o.k.

Last year's gold squish was meant to cut off the increasing inflation the prices were having back then, and to reduce the ridicolously high prices there were on the servers.

since the gold squish the prices have gone back to normal and the inflation now is basically null (sometimes even negative).

i dont think another gold squish (specially one as big as 50%) is needed, and if done so the percentage should be tunned down. otherwise you risk lowering the prices so much that players wont be willing to sell items for gold, thus making the ones that are willing to sell go for really expensive prices to compensate, thus having the oposite effect of the gold squish.

Lmao

With all of this in mind, we have concluded that all realms will receive a gold squish of 50% on January 4, 2018 giving players, once again, our usual warning and plenty of time to use up their reserves before we commence the adjustment of the economy.

I don't see how gold squish will maintain a healthy economy. Last time it was just a chaos after squish. Just say it directly donate and buy gold using coin if u want. Don't store gold. or just stop trading of gold on website.

This will not solve anything. Gold sellers will simply increase their prices, farm the same way as they have, legit people will lose interest to play seeing as the server is nothing like blizzlike where there is no such thing as gold squish which makes their efforts useless. They will be even more poor and bots will farm the same way as they had so far. In about 5 months they'll have the same amount of gold.

So squishing the gold is a bandaid to having the accelerated xp on servers which causes quest rewards at max level to give way to much gold. The problem isn't gold sellers. It's that too much gold is making it into the economy through normal game mechanics that are effected by the increased xp gains. Getting ridiculous high gold rewards has its benefits. For one it promotes more questing and more people out in the world doing these quests. It also increases the price of low level items which allows leveling players to be able to buy their mount after doing a little bit of farming.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that most bots that farm trade goods are sold at market price and don't really ADD gold to the market. The addition of too much gold is from inflated quest rewards. Fix those and future gold squishes will not be necessary.

This post really sounds like a punishment, especially for Icecrown's players.

Last year, we had a gold squish, but it was an "intelligent" one. It was not only a gold squish, but a change in the rules :
Gold rate from x7 to x3
Weapon skills from x5 to x3
Profession rate from x5 to x3
Reputation rate from x7 to x3

I don't know how to explain that in english so it will be a little rude : last year the money we have was cut by 50%, but at the same time, all the way to get money seen their rate x7 to x3. This leads to don't reduce a lot the inner value of 1 gold too much.

This next year, you just cut our money by 50%, but don't reduce the way to obtain money...this means than our actual money have an inner value equal to 50% of the money obtained after the gold squish...I don't see in what this will makes the economy more healthy. I think the only thing you want by doing this is reducing the amount of money in game. I can understand that, but if you want to do it, just makes the lottery come back or something to reduce the money "legit". We all know that the money don't decrease in WoW because there isn't enough thing that reduce your money : few mount, some repair, respec aren't enough to reduce the money in game, especially in a game that don't evolve (means no new content added, so no new way to makes player's money decrease)

i suport this, and vote for reducing all gold and xp rates to times 1,
also gold spamers arent only issue, character selers, and those that trade chars and whatnot for items in other games, and similar stuff.
i also vote for cheaters instantly geting perma bann.